Notes on Writing More

I used to publish about two posts a year. Lately I've been publishing closer to two a month. Nothing dramatic changed — I didn't quit my job, I didn't get a writing coach — but a handful of small habits stacked up.

Lower the activation energy

The single biggest change was making it stupid easy to start a draft. I have a shortcut that opens a new file in content/posts/ with the frontmatter pre-filled. That's it. The friction between "I have an idea" and "I am typing words into a file" is now about two seconds.

Publish before it's done

I used to treat each post like a small essay, polished until it shone. Now I treat them more like blog posts — which, it turns out, is what they are. I publish things that are 80% there, and I'm allowed to come back and fix them.

A few rules I try to follow:

1. If a draft sits for more than a week, I either publish it or delete it.
2. No post is allowed to have more than three sections on the first pass.
3. If I'm not excited to write it, I'm allowed to abandon it without guilt.

Write about small things

Big posts ("Everything I Learned About Distributed Systems") almost never get finished. Small posts ("One Weird Thing About setTimeout") almost always do. And honestly, the small ones are the ones people actually read.

The compounding part

The unexpected bonus: writing more makes writing easier. Each post warms up the muscle for the next one. Two months of consistent posting and I now have ideas faster than I can write them down — which, for someone who used to stare at a blank page for an hour, is a small miracle.